The USC Bollywood dance team performs during the Bollywood Berkeley competition in Oakland. (AP)

Oakland (California), March 5 (AP): An Indian boy with a suitcase and an “I love NY” T-shirt stumbles onstage, grinning at the New York skyline and the chic Indian-American girls strolling by.

But these American-raised girls want nothing to do with an immigrant fresh from the subcontinent. What’s a boy to do?

Dance, of course.

And what better way to dance than in an inter-collegiate dance meet.

Bollywood dance competitions involve teams of Indian-American college students who bring the music and dance traditions of their forebears into an American world of pre-performance huddles, cheerleading and a thirst for the first place.

The dancers act out the challenges of living between cultures through the sugary boy-meets-girl plots and high-energy choreography of the movies they grew up watching.

“It’s like a bridge between Hindi and American culture,” said Rashi Birla, 22, who dances on the University of California, Los Angeles, Ind team. “There’s nothing like this in India.”

The UCLA team was one of 10 that met recently in a competition held by Indus, an Indian students’ group at the University of California, Berkeley.

As the dancing began, the team’s lead performer spun around, revealing that his “I love NY” T-shirt said “I love India more” on the back.

“Let me show you how things are done in India,” he said.

A scene later, wearing flashy new costumes glittering with sequins, the new immigrant meets the young Americanised Indian woman at a club. After eight minutes of frenetic dancing and yet another wardrobe change she’s in love.

The 1,500 people in the audience roared with approval.

Dance competitions such as Bollywood Berkeley, billed as the biggest in the country, draw on Indian art forms, but clearly they are a cultural composite. Even the choreography mixes the fluttering hands and lateral head weaves of traditional Indian dance with hip-hop and modern dance.

“With all immigrants, there’s an effort to recreate oneself in a new environment,” said Miriam Ben-Yoseph, a DePaul University researcher whose work touches on such issues as “cultural homelessness”.

“You become a hybrid of your old culture and the culture that you’re joining. You create something you’re comfortable with. And your children inherit that mixture and create their new one, because they have more of the new place’s stamp on them.”

The Bollywood movies from which the songs and kitschy plots are drawn are mass entertainment in India that “mingle the allure of wealth and luxury around a core of traditional morality”, said Robert Goldman, professor at UC Berkeley’s department of south and Southeast Asia studies.

The rise of popular culture as an academic discipline, which brought analysis of hip-hop and Star Wars to university classrooms, has also led to a recent scholarly examining of Bollywood, said Goldman.

For Indian-American students reared in the US, Bollywood dance competitions have become a way to connect with their parents’ culture without losing touch with what they see on MTV and elsewhere.